SALVADOR REBELS URGED TO DEFECT

The Salvadoran Army, using leaflets, loudspeakers and radio and television, has begun a major effort to encourage anti-Government guerrillas to defect and receive an amnesty.

The leaflets, hundreds of thousands of them, are being dropped from planes over guerrilla positions each week. The message appeals to the rebels as errant brothers who are welcome to come home - a departure from the Government's long-standard terms of address, in which the guerrillas have been called terrorists and subversives.

Now they are ''companeros,'' Spanish for comrades or companions.

The Government literature expresses sympathy with the desire for social justice that motivated many young people to become rebels and says they can now work for this goal without violence under El Salvador's democracy.

The leaflets use the symbols and the red and black colors of the guerrilla coalition, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and appear at first glance to be guerrilla, not army, propaganda.

Among the leaflets are thousands of safe-conduct passes signed by the military chief of staff, Gen. Adolfo Blandon. A guerrilla seeking amnesty may fill in his own name and organization and take the pass to an army base.

The army colonel in charge of psychological operations, who asked that his name not be used for security reasons, said he was fighting ''a war without bullets - almost a competition against deaths in combat.''

''With the same techniques the Americans developed to sell Coca-Cola,'' he said, ''we are selling the guerrillas prosperity and the possibility of resuming their former lives. The goal is to defeat the enemy but to get them to turn themselves in and reincorporate into national life. There is no desire for revenge in this.''

The star of the new army propaganda is Napoleon Romero, a former high-ranking guerrilla commander known by the nom de guerre Miguel Castellanos. Since his desertion in April from the Popular Liberation Forces, one of the five rebel groups making up the Farabundo Marti Front, he has assisted the army in making television and radio broadcasts, and his face and message appear on posters and leaflets.

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''I quit the F.P.L. because I want to build a better democracy for my people, not destroy it violently,'' reads one of his appeals. ''For that, I have joined the democratic process.''

Interviews With Defectors

The psychological operations center interviews former rebels and rebel supporters to learn why and under what circumstances they abandoned the guerrilla movement, whether others want to give up, and what the army can do to make the amnesty offer more appealing. The interviewers also ask where the former rebels heard or saw the amnesty message.

About 25 psychologists and social workers, most of them women, conduct the interviews, which the colonel said are distinct from any questioning done by other sections of the military for intelligence. The United States has helped with technical aspects of the operation, such as the supply of printing equipment, the colonel said, but all the ideas about the substance of the questioning came from Salvadorans.

The colonel said he believed that the new emphasis on amnesty would soon bring a marked increase in defections by rebels. He said he had noted that within two or three days after a ''bombardment'' of propaganda leaflets, guerrillas begin to seek amnesty.

Army figures show that 123 guerrilla combatants surrendered in the first five months of this year, although only 41 were armed. In addition, the army says that 219 people known here as ''masas'' - active guerrilla supporters - asked for amnesty.

The psychological operations center is urging soldiers in the field to respect the life of anyone coming to an army base to seek amnesty.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 1985, on Page A00003 of the National edition with the headline: SALVADOR REBELS URGED TO DEFECT. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe